Archive for July 2014

It has been brought to our attention that starting at 11 a.m. in San Dimas, California, on August 2 the Jay Sugarman Auction Corp. will be auctioning over 200,000 Full Tilt Poker-branded items worth approximately $3,500,000. It’s being dubbed the biggest poker “garage sale” of all time.

Offering you and all poker fans of the “Red Room,” as well as any lover of poker collections, gadgets, books, etc. the opportunity to score Full Tilt Poker-branded clothing, freezer mugs, golf bags, even Full Tilt Poker hoodies for your dogs.

You’ll have a chance at getting tons of other stuff at this auction, but from what we are hearing this is not the end of Full Tilt. In fact, on July 18, 2014, the poker room announced its intention to drop “Poker” from its name and come back soon as Full Tilt Gaming. Full Tilt is now owned by Amaya Gaming and they are reporting that the new room will be an online-gaming hub that will be able to combine all of Full Tilt Poker’s original poker menu with a large number of casino games that are the property of Amaya Gaming.

We wish them all well. Personally, I am still old school and prefer a live room and the feel of the felt at the poker tables. I still crave a poker room filled with people trying to stare me down and take my poker chips.

During the long wait until the football season begins again, which for Aggie fans like me is August 28 when Texas A&M plays the South Carolina Gamecocks, and the even longer wait until the November Nine face off against each other at the WSOP Final Table, there’s not a whole lot that gets me excited (other than my beautiful wife, of course).

So, we decided it was time to do a redesign of the Texas Poker Store website. The site has had the same look and feel since we began selling poker-related products online three years ago. We have probably doubled or tripled the amount of products we offer, but the site has remained the same.

We originally designed the site in shades of brown, with a wood-grained, down-home Texas country feel to it. That look was important in establishing our brand identity. Once we started to become recognized, we didn’t want to mess with success, so we didn’t make any changes. Then, we got into social media, and when it came time to design a business page for Facebook and then for Twitter, we wanted something eye-catching, but also more closely aligned with the look associated with poker sites. That meant bold primary colors, lots of black, red and green chips and a hand of cards. We used a variation of that design for our blog site as well. And our friends and fans started reacting to it, letting us know they loved the new look.

We realized that our brand was really our name and our logo, consisting of the Texas Lone Star and TPS in a circle and that everything else could change; it didn’t matter. So, to maintain a consistent identity across platforms we’ve redesigned the store to share the same look as our social sites, incorporating our logo, the chips and the best damn hand you can draw in any standard poker game . . . a royal flush.

We’re launching the new site tonight and we’re excited. We’re so excited that we want to give something away! The tenth person who lets us know they like the new look by sending us an email from the contact page at TexasPokerStore.com – will win this 300-piece poker chip set in an aluminum case, complete with two decks of standard poker cards, a dealer button and blind buttons.

It seems to me that when asking for advice on how to play your best poker from poker communities around the world, everyone always has their own tips that are sure to help you walk away from the poker table a winner more often than a loser.

Here are a few of our favorite tips that we have culled from friends who have often made final tables at the WSOP and other poker events around the world:

Keep your eyes on your opponents: Always watch the other players at your table, even when you are no longer in the hand. Watch closely how they bet, their table talk, body language and other physical “tells” that may give you clues to their hole cards and how they will play them in the next hand.

Don’t rush to check your hole cards: Watch the other players first; most of them will check their hole cards as soon as they get them and many of them will react to what they got in a way that may tell you if they have a strong hand or not. When you do look at your cards try not to react at all.

You shouldn’t play every hand: Always be ready to fold when you know your hand is weak; don’t try to improve a weak hand. If it is obvious that you can be beaten easily be ready to give it up no matter how good your hole cards may be. Give it up even if you have already contributed to the pot.

Be cautious when bluffing: Don’t bluff just for the thrill of bluffing and definitely don’t bluff just to keep yourself from folding all the time. Always fold if you have to and only bluff sparingly and strategically. Remember that bluffing can only work in certain situations and only against certain players. If your opponent always calls everything it’s best not to try to bluff him.

Never play when you are on tilt: Don’t play when you’re mad, or tired, drunk or wasted. If you’re upset about anything, you’ll start playing emotionally, not rationally, and all your opponents will pick up on that and walk all over you easily. Walk away if you lose your cool.

And one of our favorite players at the WSOP Main Event had these words of wisdom:

He said: I hate playing with loud-mouths and show-offs and I can’t stand a sore loser. When you win you should always be a humble, and if you lose you should always walk away with dignity.

There are a lot of more tips and advice but we’ll save them for another time.

The final shoot-out to reach and become a part of the Final Nine players in the 45th Annual World Series of Poker $10,000 No-Limit Hold’em Main Event finished in style around 2:00 a.m. this morning. These guys are all that remains of the massive field of 6,683 players. Congratulations to all.

The seat assignment for these guys is as follows:

Seat 1 – “Billy Pappas” Pappaconstantinou – 17,500,000 – 29-year-old from Lowell, Massachusetts, who is playing for the first time ever in the WSOP Main Event.

Seat 2 – Felix Stephensen – 32,775,000 – 23-year-old from Oslo, Norway. Although he has never cashed at the WSOP, this is his second year in a row playing in the Main Event.

Seat 3 – Jorryt van Hoof – 38,375,000 – 31-year-old from Eindhoven, Netherlands. van Hoof has three previous WSOP cashes but has never cashed in the Main Event. He enters this final table as the chip leader with 19% + of chips in play.

Seat 4 – Mark Newhouse – 26,000,000 – 29-year-old now from Las Vegas, Nevada, has the distinct honor of becoming the first-ever November Niner to make back-to-back WSOP Main Event final tables. Newhouse finished in 9th place in 2013, collecting $733,224. He has eight previous WSOP cashes and has a total of live poker tournament winnings of $2,776,172.

Seat 5 – Andoni Larrabe – 22,550,000 – 22-year-old from Basque, Spain, is the youngest player remaining in the field. Larrabe only has three previous WSOP cashes and this is his second year in a row playing in the Main Event.

Seat 6 – William Tonking – 15,050,000 – 27-year-old from Flemington, New Jersey. Tonking came into this Main Event with three previous WSOP cashes but this is his first time to cash in the Main Event.

Seat 7 – Daniel Sindelar – 21,200,000 – 30-year-old from Columbus, Nebraska, comes into this Main Event with 17 previous WSOP cashes but, although he has played the Main Event every year for the past six years this marks his first time to cash in any of them. He has played a total of 19 WSOP events this summer.

Seat 8 – Martin Jacobson – 14,900,000 – 27-year-old originally from Stockholm, Sweden. Enters this event with over a million in WSOP cashes ($1,224,706 – 15 total cashes). Jacobson finished in 6th place during last year’s $111,111 One Drop High Roller event and earned $807,42,000. However, this is the first time he has cashed in the WSOP Main Event.

Seat 9 – Bruno Politano – 12,125,000 – 31-year-old from Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil. Politano is the first Brazilian ever to make the WSOP Main Event final table. He entered ten events this year and has cashed in three of them including this Main Event. He enters by the skin of his teeth with the shortest stack.